Stripe: $7B OpenRouter Buy Builds AI Machine Stack

Stripe acquires OpenRouter for $7B as the core of a roughly $10B effort to own the full infrastructure stack of the machine economy, folding stablecoins, wallets, usage billing, payments, blockchain settlement and now AI inference routing into one commercial platform. The deal hands Stripe control over AI inference routing economics that hinge on price, performance, compute and availability, letting the company commercialize crypto and AI primitives through its Web2 distribution. Stripe now positions itself as the economic operating system for AI firms and agents while creating fresh concentration risk and direct competition with Ramp.